THE RUSI JOURNAL

A cOLLEcTIvE FAILURE OF gRAND

STRATEgy
THE WEST’S UNINTENDED WARS OF cHOIcE
Lukas milevski

Confusing battle for war and tactics for strategy, the West has found itself unable to
counter the ‘cumulative strategy’ of its opponents. In the winning entry to the 2010
Trench Gascoigne Essay Prize, Lukas Milevski argues that the use of military force must be
confined to Schelling’s triad of taking, protecting and hurting.

T
oday the West finds itself in a
strategic situation of some irony.
For the greater part of the past
thirty years, the only wars in which the
West (loosely defined as NATO-based
countries) has become involved have
been wars of choice. This is a happy
circumstance, indicating its privileged
position in the world, bereft of capable
or willing existential dangers. Although
discretionary, the wars the West is
fighting are increasingly of a type in which
it does not really wish to engage – long
wars, against indeterminate foes. Such
wars bleed the West of its wealth, its
manpower and its political prestige both
domestically and internationally. Many
interventions meant to maintain or even
improve the West’s relative international
position are in actuality accomplishing
just the opposite – weakening that
position through a diffusion of assets,
prestige and power into ill-considered
endeavours. This represents a failure
on two separate levels. If one aspect
of strategy is using war for political
purposes, then clearly there is a distinct
lack of understanding of grand strategic
goals and processes. Second, if other
aspects of strategy concern the actual
conduct of war, Western combatants
misconceptualise the nature of war
and strategy as battle and tactics, with
predictable results on the ground. This
breakdown of military strategy greatly
exacerbates the pre-existing absence of
grand strategy.
Taking, Protecting, Hurting
War is but one tool of grand strategy,
perhaps the bluntest when compared to
others which may persuade or dissuade,
subvert or deny. Following Thomas
Schelling, force has three assignments:
taking, protecting and hurting, the last
singularly being an innate quality of
force.1 When employed, war does not
impact simply the two belligerents, but
indirectly leaves its mark upon allies,
neighbours and rogues, each drawing
its own lessons on the meaning of war,
perhaps at odds with what the warring
parties believe. War, therefore, can never
be a private matter between two parties;
even the smallest war will have at least
limited international ramifications. To
wage a war signifies having an immediate
effect upon the world. Successful grand
strategy demands mastery of two factors.
First is the discipline needed to order
national interests by priority, in other
words where the West most wishes to
achieve strategic effect. This requisite
discipline has been lost as the concept
of security has expanded. Second is an
understanding of the reciprocal nature
of all human interaction, exacerbated
by the overt hostility that war implies,
placing the involved parties in direct,
violent competition. Strategic effect is
an unavoidable result of war however
it is conducted, but undirected effect is
impartial and chaotic, possibly equally
positive or negative.
Post-Heroic Warfare
The success of a grand strategy that
utilises war is thus dependent upon how
the strategic effect in war is shaped. The
conduct of war is of central importance
to grand strategy. Even the best grand
strategy falls apart if the military strategy
responsible for the conduct of the war,
upon which said grand strategy relies,
has been misjudged. In the post-Cold
War era, the expansion of security into
tenuously related fields such as economic
or human security has led to a diffuse
grand strategy, which amplifies the need
for proper military strategy.
War can never be a
private matter
In the mid-1990s, Edward Luttwak
identified a trend in warfare which he
styled ‘post-heroic’. It was characterised
by professional armies and a reliance
on technology rather than manpower
to achieve effect and to avoid media-
sensitive casualties.2 This entailed the
greatest separation between nation
and warfare since the advent of popular
armies. The West has simultaneously

© RUSI JOURNAL FEBRUARY/MARCH 2011 VOL. 156 NO. 1 pp. 30–33 DOI: 10.1080/03071847.2011.559975

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 ISAF soldiers on patrol in one of the West’s unintended wars of choice. Photo courtesy of Helmand Blog.
both bucked and followed this post-
heroic inclination. This past decade has
witnessed far more manpower-intensive
tasks than the previous one, yet also
the unprecedentedly large-scale use of
modern technology, epitomised by drone
operations, in place of human presence
and action. The Americans particularly,
but to some extent the entire NATO-
influenced West, do not have a way of
war, but rather a way of battle. War is
approached intellectually as if it were
battle, an activity whose participants are
not concerned about politics or strategy,
but rather purely with operations or
tactics. This approach induces the danger
of battle becoming an end in itself.3 This
‘tacticisation’ of war frequently makes a
post-war security presence necessary, for
the West has the military power to freeze
conflict, but lacks the insight to resolve it.
The pattern of war since 2001 indicates
that, although the West can effect great
change quickly at relatively little cost,
ultimately the true cost of intervention
is exacted once the achievement of
result must be defended. The 1990s
adequately illustrated this dynamic
through the myriad of missions sent to
RUSI 156_1 TEXT.indd 31
the Balkans to guarantee the peace; the
NATO Kosovo Force remains in place
to this day, more than a decade after
Operation Allied Force. Although these
missions to the Balkans have not been
forcefully challenged since the cessation
of hostilities, their necessity indicates
the possibility of similar challenges
elsewhere, finally borne out in Iraq and
Afghanistan.
Cumulative Strategy
The tactics used to challenge the West
in Iraq and Afghanistan are those of
guerrillas and terrorists. But these are
tactics; there is no such thing as guerrilla
or terrorist strategy. What they do have
is a form of cumulative strategy, part of
the strategic dichotomy Herbert Rosinski
introduced and US Navy Rear Admiral
Joseph Caldwell Wylie elaborated
and adopted as the centrepiece to his
own theory of military strategy. It is an
‘entire pattern … made up of a collection
of lesser actions, but these lesser or
individual actions are not sequentially
interdependent. Each individual one
is no more than a single statistic, an
isolated plus or minus, in arriving at
the final result.’4 Cumulative strategy is
strategy for the weak in that it is based
upon avoidance, but weakness is not
necessarily the sole reason one would
choose such a strategy; indeed, cultural
factors may automatically determine that
this strategy be followed involuntarily. A
cumulative strategy conducted properly
may be a highly effective, albeit lengthy,
method of achieving a particular kind
of strategic effect. It is unfortunate for
the West that cumulative strategy is
well suited to countering both post-
heroic military policy and the Western
misconception of war as battle.
Strategic effect is an
unavoidable result of
war
The strategic effect of cumulative
strategy is predicated upon its ability
to deny control to the enemy without
asserting it for oneself, control being
the ‘imposition of certainty upon any
given situation’, all the way up to the
war as a whole.5 Certainty imposed is
that of ends, but not ways: one may be
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 A collective failure of grand strategy
certain that one will be successful, even
without knowing exactly by which path
that end-state will be reached. Strategy
relates to control and certainty in three
distinct manners. A strategic actor may
assert control (as in, indicate that one
can exercise control), which indicates
certainty; exercise control, which fulfils
certainty; or deny control, which disputes
certainty. Battle is the most significant
means of asserting control and, in the
case of victory, of exercise of control; it is
not connected to only denial of control.
The West, viewing war through the lens
of battle, when denied control, forms
ideas such as hybrid war as its intellectual
response to the challenge, although
what is really envisaged is hybrid battle.
Avoidance is alien to battle whereas it
is not alien to war. This leaves the full
import of cumulative strategy outside
the scope of recent Western concepts
created to understand it. The true effect
of cumulative strategy upon post-heroic
military policy and the battle-centric
concept of war is debilitating.
The conduct of war is
of central importance
to grand strategy
Wielding a Swift Sword
Cumulative strategy depends upon
avoidance of the enemy; one can only
deny control to a superior enemy if one is
not drawn into a significant engagement
in which that same enemy can inflict a
decisive defeat and assert control over
the pattern of the war. For militaries
whose institutional mindset conceives
of war as battle, avoidance and denial
are bewildering. There can be no battle
if there is no enemy, yet an opponent is
clearly present, albeit not apparent. An
avoiding foe whom one cannot locate is
free to act, confident that control over
the course of the war has been denied
and is absent to the superior belligerent.
Denial is a necessarily slow manner of
achieving effect, whereas the West’s
preferred methods of asserting and
exercising control are meant to be quick
and decisive. Cumulative strategy is a
slow-acting poison, whereas the West
prefers to wield a swift sword.
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This fundamental asymmetry in
strategic thought has led to an energetic
search for methods of countering
cumulative strategy. This same energy,
combined with a lack of conceptual
rigour, unfortunately leads the West
to mistake its counter-insurgent and
counter-terrorist tactics for a strategy
and even to see such tactics as an end in
themselves. They alone cannot address
the fundamental question of strategic
connection of means, ways and ends,
but are instead tools for the strategist
to wield as he chooses in the process
of addressing this question.6 Population
protection tactics on their own cannot
impose defeat upon an insurgency but
merely make avoidance more difficult for
the insurgent. Yet population protection
is worth little if young men sneak off to
join the insurgents anyway. It is thus a
necessary action, but not a sufficient one;
the pool of potential indigenous recruits
for the insurgency must be shrunk as well
to reduce the insurgency’s durability. The
archetypal consequence of population
protection is the restriction of insurgent
groups to less-populated regions to ease
the tasks of detection and elimination.
In practice, a porous border between
countries may mitigate much of the
effect of population protection tactics,
and require similar measures from the
border’s other side. Trans-border post-
heroic efforts (such as drone strikes) are
insufficient and indeed perhaps counter-
productive; the beneficial strategic
effects may only be fleeting, whereas the
neighbour’s outrage and hostility may last
much longer and be more serious.
The Ultimate Failure of Post-
Heroic Strategy
Post-heroic military policy cushions
the populations of the West from the
challenges faced, mistakes made, and
injurious strategic effect suffered in
other parts of the world. The West may
be at war, but that war is far away and
life at home goes on largely as normal,
excepting military families. This gap is
quickly spanned by reports of casualties
which adversely affect populations
at home. These populations require
concrete results for casualties suffered
to justify the sacrifice. In a sizeable
battle, even if casualties are high, there
is an immediate implicit if not explicit
result; someone wins, someone loses,
something significant is decided.
The Americans do not
have a way of war, but
rather a way of battle
The conduct of cumulative strategy
explicitly denies the possibility of
concrete results through engagements.
Instead, although the casualty rates
may hypothetically be the same, they
are dispersed across a much longer time
period. Rather than a single, shocking
closure of the gap, many intermittent,
small spikes of war become a minor but
ever-recurring theme in the daily life
of a nation. Post-heroic military policy
ultimately fails because, although styled
to make interventions more acceptable
and less onerous for the public, the gap
between war and nation never remains
wide enough for the separation effect to
occur. It is constantly narrowed time and
time again. This would be acceptable if
the sacrifice obtained the desired result,
but the opponent’s cumulative strategy
precludes results through denial of
control and progress through achieving
control. The consequence is stalemate
at best and a deteriorating situation at
worst. Cumulative strategy collapses the
central tenet of post-heroic military policy
– achieving a beneficial effect without
straining the nation. Instead, effect is
extremely difficult to achieve over the
long term and even this non-result cannot
be accomplished without distressing the
domestic population.
Strategic effect, even if it
undermines the opposing strategy,
means little unless it ultimately influences
the opponent’s decision-making. This
is the great weakness of employing a
cumulative strategy. Wylie, writing in
the 1960s, noted that ‘there is no major
instance in which a cumulative strategy,
operating by itself, has been successful’.7
Just as the efficacy of cumulative
strategy is based upon avoidance
and denial of the chance to impose
a condition of helplessness upon the
cumulative strategists, so too are these
same strategists incapable of utilising
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cumulative strategy to inflict helplessness
upon the enemy. A cumulative strategy
may never defeat an opponent militarily,
but it can induce him to recognise his
inability to force a result and withdraw
of his own accord. Such recognition does
not come readily, resulting in a downward
spiral of inappropriate strategies,
overlong interventions, increased
casualties and popular discontent. In a
situation where neither party can impose
a decisive defeat upon the other, but can
only induce a breakdown of will through
the accumulation of minor effects, the
deciding factor is the willpower and
amount of support each enjoys within
its decision-making processes and the
general population.
The West’s Desire to Escape
The ultimate effect of cumulative
strategy is a disconnection between the
superior opponent’s military strategy and
grand strategy. A grand strategy relying
primarily upon the use of force and
ignoring other available tools will find
itself hobbled, able only to undertake
those tasks identified by Schelling: taking,
protecting, hurting. These imply that the
opponent is an outright foe who must
be hurt, whose resources must be taken,
or whose attacks must be deflected.
However, most recently none of these
conditions are truly applicable. The West
has involved itself in locations not only
where it does not wish to remain, but
indeed from which it seems eager to
escape. Taking cannot be a valid mission
in such circumstances. Hurting the foe is
unlikely due to the logic of cumulative
strategy. Protecting applies to a brace of
Notes
1 Thomas C Schelling, Arms and Influence
(New Haven, NJ: Yale University Press,
2008), p. 2.
2 Edward Luttwak, ‘Toward Post-Heroic
Warfare,’ Foreign Affairs (Vol. 74, No. 3,
May–June 1995), pp. 109–22.
3 Antulio J Echevarria II, Toward an
American Way of War (Carlisle, PA:
Strategic Studies Institute, 2004).
RUSI 156_1 TEXT.indd 33
client governments but denied the ability
to engage, how may one protect?
There is no such thing
as guerrilla or terrorist
strategy
Yet the validity or invalidity of these three
tasks obfuscates the nature of missions
such as those in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Although not originally planned as such,
both of these interventions have over
the past decade become missions of
nation-building. The real task is Creation.
This is not something any military force
can accomplish, and is difficult even
without the adverse pressures of war.
One cannot make an omelette without
breaking a few eggs, as the saying goes,
but nevertheless breaking the eggs and
making the omelette are two separate
actions requiring two separate skill-sets.
Force may be used to protect the process
of nation-building to some extent, but
cannot otherwise be involved in it. To
complicate matters further, any state’s
first priority must necessarily be to
safeguard its own power, without which
it is a failed state. The nascent state must
necessarily provide for its own security,
which it may have little incentive to do
when dependent on others for apparently
indefinite periods of time.
Time is against the West. With every
day the strategic situation deteriorates
further and spreads across national
borders. Each day also decreases Western
willingness to continue the fight and
increases the burden of costs in both
4 J C Wylie, Military Strategy: A General
Theory of Power Control (Annapolis, MD:
Naval Institute Press, 1989), p. 3.
5 Lukas Milevski, ‘Revisiting J.C. Wylie’s
Dichotomy of Strategy: The Effects of
Sequential and Cumulative Patterns of
Operations,’ Journal of Strategic Studies,
forthcoming.
6 Gian P Gentile, ‘A Strategy of Tactics:
lukas milevski
manpower and money. Contributing
states to the ISAF mission in Afghanistan
have already begun leaving, or setting
time limits on how much longer their
troops can stay; even the United States
is following suit. The indeterminate
character of cumulative strategy is slowly
but inexorably winning.
The past decade may be remembered
as the time when the West suffered a
collective failure of grand strategy, being
too militarised in its outlook to recognise
the limitations of force and therefore
unable to match military means and
ways to political ends. The lack of serious
strategic thought has lead to a decline in
faith in the efficacy and applications of
military power, for it has been called upon
to accomplish tasks that are alien to its
natural assignments of taking, protecting
and hurting. Rekindling confidence in the
strategy-making processes in Western
corridors of power is necessary, for good
strategy will renew trust in the armed
forces while simultaneously allowing other
tools of national power the scope they
require to work well. ■
Lukas Milevski has an MA in Strategic
Studies from the University of Reading
and currently interns at the British-
American Security Information Council,
Washington. Milevski is interested in
strategic effect, war termination and
grand strategy. He spoke at the Scottish
Centre for War Studies conference and
has published in Defence Viewpoints
and RUSI Newsbrief. This is the winning
entry in the 2010 Trench Gascoigne
Essay Prize, RUSI’s annual essay-writing
competition.
Population-centric COIN and the Army’,
Parameters (Vol. 39, No. 3, Autumn
2009), pp. 5–17.
7 Wylie, op. cit., p. 25.
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